Saturday, July 06, 2013

Let's begin by this Jane Eyre discussion held on the latest episode (July 2) of The Book Club (ABC1, Australia):

Considered by many to be ahead of its time, Jane Eyre explores the changing fortunes of its main character after she is orphaned at the age of ten. With a subtext of social critique, Jane Eyre is more than just a coming-of-age story as it examines sexuality, morality and religion through the prism of the nineteenth century.
Host: Jennifer Byrne
Regulars: Marieke Hardy and Jason Steger
Guests: authors Benjamin Law and Carrie Tiffany

Red House Museum will host a Wedding Open Day this weekend. The event, on Sunday from noon-3.30pm, will be a chance for couples and their friends and families to view this new wedding venue – complete with stunning gardens - in all its glory. Red House in Oxford Road, Gomersal, is a Grade II Listed 1830s cloth merchant’s home with connections to the Bronte family. Charlotte Bronte was a frequent visitor and featured Red House in her novel Shirley and the Yorke family was modelled on her good friend Mary Taylor and her family.

We had no excuse. We were not naive teens but supposedly sensible thirtysomethings. We’d read Wuthering Heights but somehow we hadn’t absorbed the haunting passage in which Cathy spurns Heathcliff because they were ineligible for a transferable tax allowance. The lack of a married couple’s dowry is, of course, the unstated reason why Humphrey Bogart sent Ingrid Bergman packing at the end of Casablanca. It’s a shame, but hey, they’ll always have Paris. (Robert Shrimsley)

From: G Marsden, Buxton Avenue, Heanor, Derby. It is a shame about the Brontë Clock (Yorkshire Post, July 3) and the fact that it has stopped due to a health and safety ban on winding it up again. It is a pity it did not stop at five minutes past eleven. That would be a fitting gesture to the health and safety executives.

Another letter with a sense of humour can be found in Financial Times concerning the Austen bank notes:

While I would not like to debate the relative merits of Agatha Christie versus Katie Price, I believe that Miss Austen would be a worthy candidate, as of course would the Brontës (especially en bloc): but would the Bank of England then include brother Branwell? And, if not, why not? (Matthew Wesley)

The Yorkshire Post announces some of the highlights of this year's Ilkey Literature Festival (October):

Kirsty Wark, best known for fronting BBC2’s Newsnight, will be talking about her first novel, and the influence the Brontës have had on her writing.

1999 Composer-lyricist Paul Gordon and librettist-director John Caird's musical, Jane Eyre, based on the Charlotte Brontë novel, opens at Southern California's La Jolla Playhouse tonight. The story of an impoverished governess who falls in love with her employer will make its way to Broadway Dec. 10, 2000. Despite a handful of major Tony Award nominations, a Drama Desk Award for lead actress Marla Schaffel and a donation by songwriter Alanis Morrisette of $150,000 to keep it running, the show ends its journey June 10, 2001.

But we already know that a story by the governess about a mother kept prisoner in an attic while someone else plays the parenting role just sells and sells and sells, and made all the Brontë sisters famous. So, if there really is a pregnant surrogate waiting in the rafters a la Jane Eyre, eating off trays sent up impersonally by dumbwaiter, the Mids don’t need an observant servant to make a note of that! (Sarah Whalen)

Well, Jane only made Charlotte famous, but anyway. Hamptons presents a local production of The Mystery of Irma Vep:

The satirical play lampoons several genres including Victorian melodrama, farce, and the penny dreadful, as well as some specific works such as Brontë's Wuthering Heights and the Alfred Hitchcock film Rebecca. (Andrew Nachemson)

ScreenRant publishes a list with the worst films of 2012, including House at the End of The Street:

Screenwriter David Louka recycles parts from Jane Eyre and Psycho - and used them in a tale about modern teenagers - to create last year's forgettable Jennifer Lawrence thriller House at the End of the Street. (Sandy Schaefer)

Télam (Argentina) interviews the poet Juan Gelman. The interviewer really has to work on his English classics:

This is something we would like to know more about. Diario de Ibiza (Spain) reports that the artist Sarah Nechamkin (living in the island) illustrated once Wuthering Heights. Regrettably we have been unable to find out whether that edition was ever published or not. The Writers' Lens interviews the author Nancy Means Wright:

Describe the best writer you know and something wonderful he or she has written. I guess I’d go back to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The novel came out of her early life in a grim girls’ boarding school (I could relate, having spent five years in a girl’s boarding school after my father died.). I’ve read the book four or five times at least, and seen every film. The first person narrative is written with such intensity and sensitivity that I’ve lived every moment of it. The novel has something for everyone: romance, passion, empathy (with Mr. Rochester—especially in his blindness). Suspense, yes, when their wedding is called off, a gothic sense of horror as the mad, desperate wife Bertha burns down the manse. Most of all, it’s the brilliance of the writing itself that draws me in. I could never, ever hope to emulate it. I can just keep re-reading it.

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Weekly Quote

Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town, by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour—gay dresses, grand equipages, fine horses and gallant riders throng the bright streets. I see even scores of masks. It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams.
~ Villette (ch. XXXVIII) by Charlotte Brontë

'The Dissolution of Percy' - in Salford
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*Caroline Lamb writes:*
A rehearsed reading of a work entitled *The Dissolution of Percy *is
planned for the Kings Arms Theatre in Salford, Manchester, for ...